So much of this year felt like a fever dream: The attempted assassination of Donald Trump. A career-ending presidential debate. The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Abortion bans. Presidential immunity. The Alaska Airlines door fiasco. Diddy’s arrest. Raygun. Baldoni-Gate. Tradwives!
I, personally, am tired.
Which is why, this year, I’m leaning into my nerdish tendencies and rounding up some good, interesting, or inspiring news stories from the science world—promising discoveries, exciting new data, historic events, and unsung heroes.
In the hope of providing relief from the hell that has been 2024, here’s a non-comprehensive list of the year’s coolest science stories, both big and small:
Possibly the first-ever photo of a newborn great white shark
Wildlife filmmaker Carlos Gauna and University of California, Riverside, PhD student Phillip Sternes spotted what appears to be a baby great white shark off the coast of California last year. In January, the team published the photos in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes.
“Where white sharks give birth is one of the holy grails of shark science. No one has ever been able to pinpoint where they are born, nor has anyone seen a newborn baby shark alive,” Gauna said in a UC Riverside press release. “There have been dead white sharks found inside deceased pregnant mothers. But nothing like this.”
A powerful microorganism named “Chonkus”
From the carbon-dioxide–rich waters near Vulcano, a volcanic island just north of Sicily, researchers isolated a new microorganism, cyanobacterium UTEX 3222, nicknamed “Chonkus,” for its ability to consume carbon dioxide, Grist reports. When grown in the lab, it’s notably dense, as one scientist described it, like “green peanut butter.”
“If scientists can figure out how to genetically engineer it,” Grist‘s Sachi Kitajima Mulkey writes, “this single-celled organism’s natural quirks could become supercharged into a low-waste carbon capture system” to fight climate change. (That may be easier said than done. Read more about Chonkus here.)
Water on asteroids
For the first time, scientists detected water on the surface of an asteroid: two asteroids, in fact, Space.com‘s Samantha Mathewson reported in February, named Iris (124 miles in diameter) and Massalia (84 miles). That’s significant because scientists theorize that Earth’s water—which you and I and every other living thing on this planet need to live—originally came from asteroids. The finding backs up that theory.
And it could help spawn new theories about life outside of Earth. “Understanding of the distribution of water through space will help researchers better assess where to search for other forms of potential life,” Mathewson writes, “both in our solar system and beyond.”
Meat-eating squirrels
Honestly, ground squirrels were always a little suspect. (Are they really that different from rats?) But now, researchers have uncovered unsettling new information about their diets. Beyond consuming nuts, seeds, and acorns, a new study shows, squirrels in California also hunt and eat voles, which are small rodents—a behavior pattern the authors say had never been documented before.
“I could barely believe my eyes,” Sonja Wild, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Davis, and an author of the study, said in a press release. “From then, we saw that behavior almost every day. Once we started looking, we saw it everywhere.” The squirrels’ vole-hunting habits coincided with a boom in the state’s vole population, the researchers said, but it’s unclear what exactly sparked the change.
And yes, there’s video.
The historic, dual emergence of two cicada broods
This year, two groups of cicadas—the Great Southern Brood and the Northern Illinois Brood—emerged to breed after more than a decade burrowed in the ground, the first such dual event since 1803. As the New York Times put it, “The last time the Northern Illinois Brood’s 17-year cycle aligned with the Great Southern Brood’s 13-year period, Thomas Jefferson was president.”
If you caught this year’s event, consider yourself lucky. It’ll be another 221 years until the next time the broods emerge simultaneously.
This photo of a “bizarre” blob-headed fish
Just look at this thing.
Although it’s technically a species “new to science,” as Mongabay reports, this bristlemouth armored catfish was well-known to the Indigenous Awajun people in Peru who worked with scientists at Conservation International to identify the species in 2022.
In a report released this month, the nonprofit organization officially announced the “bizarre” fish and 26 other new species.
An injectable, long-lasting HIV drug
An effective HIV vaccine has eluded scientists for decades. But now, a new drug could be what the journal Science calls “the next best thing“: an injectable that offers protection from infection for six months.
Here’s Science, which recently named the drug its 2024 Breakthrough of the Year:
A large efficacy trial in African adolescent girls and young women reported in June that these shots reduced HIV infections to zero—an astonishing 100% efficacy. Any doubts about the finding disappeared 3 months later when a similar trial, conducted across four continents, reported 99.9% efficacy in gender diverse people who have sex with men.
Many HIV/AIDS researchers are now hopeful that the drug, lenacapavir, will powerfully drive down global infection rates when used as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). “It has the potential, if we can do it right, which means going big and getting it out there,” says Linda-Gail Bekker, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Cape Town who led one of the two efficacy trials for the drug’s maker, Gilead Sciences.
The vulnerability of meteorologist John Morales
If there’s a good news story about climate communication to come out of this year, it’s that of John Morales. In October, the veteran Miami meteorologist went viral for his emotional weather briefing on Hurricane Milton, as the storm approached central Florida from the Gulf of Mexico.
As I reported at the time, Morales initially hesitated to share a video of the briefing, during which he teared up, on X. “I was just kind of embarrassed,” he told me. “I was like, how can I lose it like that on TV?”
But to me (and many others, apparently), Morales was just the right messenger for the moment. His briefing has since been shared thousands of times, and his interview with Mother Jones was among our most-read environmental stories this year.
For decades, he said, people knew him as a “just-the-facts” kind of guy. “But the truth is that with climate-driven extremes putting us in a place that we haven’t been before, it’s very difficult to stay cool, calm, and collected.”
I debated whether to share this. I did apologize on the air. But I invite you to read my introspection on @BulletinAtomic of how extreme weather 📈 driven by global warming has changed me. Frankly, YOU should be shaken too, and demand #ClimateActionNow. https://t.co/09vxgabSmX https://t.co/GzQbDglsBG
— John Morales (@JohnMoralesTV) October 7, 2024
